How campaigns polarize the electorate

Abstract

The minimal effect theory of campaign studies stipulates that intense political competition during campaigns assures and reinforces the initial party choice of the electorate. We find that this reinforcement is two-fold. During the campaign, the party preference of the voters’ in-group party increases while the party preference of the voters’ out-group parties decreases. Voters’ preference for their most preferred party (MPP) increases during the election campaign, while their preference for their least liked party decreases during the campaign (LPP). Across parties voters experience an increase in their preference for their most preferred party and a decrease for their least liked party as the campaign progresses. These trends show that the political campaign polarizes the electorate by increasing the affective distance between in-group party and out-group party preferences, thereby resulting in stronger political polarization after the campaign than before the campaign. The data utilized in this study is a large six-wave panel-study of Danish voters’ party preferences during the Danish parliamentary election of 2011. Thus, the analysis provides evidence of the minimal effect theory and of political polarization within a multi-party context.

Political Polarization During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…These mixed findings about reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic can thus be steered by elite cues. Prior research has shown that elite cues and polarized political debate can have a decisive impact on political attitude formation and voting behavior in normal times (Zaller, 1992;Mondak, 1993;Lupia, 1994;Druckman et al, 2013) or during electoral campaigns (Hansen and Kosiara-Pedersen, 2017) and intense or biased media coverage (Levendusky, 2013;Levendusky and Malhotra, 2016). However, there is little evidence about the influence of elite cues during a pandemic in which individual behavior affects not only political outcomes but also personal health (Grossman et al, 2020).…”

Populist radical right parties and mass polarization in the Netherlands

“…Hetherington, 2001;Abramowitz and Saunders, 2008;Adams et al, 2012b;Lupu, 2015). This matters because polarization and its potential negative effects, such as higher dissatisfaction with democracy among supporters of the losing side (Iyengar et al, 2012) or worse government performance (Sørensen, 2014), are not restricted to two-party systems (Hansen and Kosiara-Pedersen, 2015). Elite polarization may lead consensual and consociational democracies into a centrifugal path, often associated with unstable regimes, as Vatter (2016) argues is happening in Switzerland.…”

How Campaigns Enhance European Issues Voting During European Parliament Elections

“…The second and third hypotheses follow obviously from the discussion above, but it might not be apparent why the first one, stipulating that interest in EU increases as the campaign commences, follows from the literature on campaign effects. However, we believe that interest is a measure, albeit imperfect, of the increased engagement with politics which have been identified as a result of campaigns (Hansen and Pedersen 2014, 305). As such, extant literature has found that being subject to more political information almost inadvertently makes voters more politically engaged (Jung, Kim and de Zúñiga 2011).…”

“…There are three main ways in which increased information can influence voters: (1) it informs voters of candidate positions (Hansen and Pedersen 2014), (2) it provides voters with opportunities to find their own position (Lenz 2009) and (3) it can prime voter interest on the issues that the information centers on (Krosnick and Kinder 1990). In the context of European Parliament elections, we would expect campaigns, and the information flow that comes with it, will affect voters in a similar manner, which, we argue, will result in issue voting on EU issues.…”

“…They intensify political communications, creating an environment filled with information about policy and performance (Farrell and Schmitt-Beck 2003; Lenz 2009). This information primes, persuades and informs voters about the politicians (or policies) up for election (Krosnick and Kinder 1990; Miller and Krosnick 2000; Valentino, Hutchings and White 2002; Lenz 2009), enabling voters to make a decision that corresponds with their underlying opinions (Gelman and King 1993; Petrocik 1996; Lenz 2013), and with a sense of being better democratic citizens (Hansen and Pedersen 2014). While this general model of political campaigns has been thoroughly documented in the extant literature, few articles have addressed how these campaign effects interact with different political contexts, specifically, how this general model maps onto different types of elections.…”